STREET LEVEL -- Canarsie; Grand Plans For a Pier, From Fish To Fountain

By JAKE MOONEY

Published: January 7, 2007

A stiff wind was blowing over Canarsie Pier the other day, and the wide parking lot, wedged between the Belt Parkway and the waterfront of southern Brooklyn, was empty except for a few cars and a cloud of seagulls swooping back and forth. Sitting in one of those cars, a blue station wagon with the window rolled down even in runny-nose weather, was Luis Irizarry, 60, retired from a job as a peace officer at the Aqueduct and Belmont horse racing tracks.

A younger man with a fishing pole stood next to the car, chatting. Mr. Irizarry, who had to pick somebody up at the airport soon, was not fishing -- but he might have been. The pier is like a second home, he said. If he isn't at the track, he's usually there.

''By Mother's Day, May, the bluefish come down here and we murder them,'' he said with a smile, a toothpick jutting from the corner of his mouth under a gray mustache. ''Early in the morning, we murder them.''

On warmer days, he has plenty of company. According to National Park Service estimates, 50,000 people a month visit the pier in the high season, between late spring and early fall. That kind of traffic can wear a place out fast, and Canarsie Pier, opened in the 1920s, is a bit frayed around the edges, with broken water fountains and missing bricks. But when the crowds return this year, they will find the place spruced up with more than $200,000 in improvements that started this fall and should continue almost until summer.

The park service, which maintains the pier as part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, has been catching some criticism at community meetings and in local weeklies for the details of the renovation, like the quality of the new surface in the playground and the paving in the parking lot. But for Mr. Irizarry, who brings a broom and sweeps up his corner of the pier every time he fishes, any improvements are welcome.

''People here, they don't have no manners,'' he said. ''They even cut fish on top of the tables.'' The scene at night gets rowdy, Mr. Irizarry added, with people fighting over spots and casting too close to one another. His group tries to reel up by dusk, hanging around only to play cards or talk. Still, he said, it rankles him: ''I see people throwing garbage on the floor, I say, 'You do that in the house?' ''

Pete McCarthy, the assistant superintendent for operations of Gateway's Jamaica Bay unit, which includes the pier, said the parks service does its best to keep things in order, but it can be hard to clean up after so many people. Then there is the difficulty of securing money for repairs -- the funds for the current work came from a request made three or four years ago, he said.

Besides the work on the parking lot and playground, there will be repairs to the bathrooms, improvements to keep pigeons from roosting in the roof of the open-air visitor center, and a study of the possibility of bringing a restaurant back to the site after an absence of four years. Also planned are some smaller touches that people like Mr. Irizarry should appreciate.

''We're going to try to get out there, do a little power-washing on the surfaces themselves, so it doesn't look like a fishing boat at the end of the day,'' Mr. McCarthy said, adding that stations with cutting boards for gutting fish and discarding carcasses are also under consideration.

''If I could find out how to get them to drop them all into a composting bucket, I'd probably be the king of New York City,'' he said. ''It's actually great fertilizer.''

Whether the summertime regulars will behave remains to be seen, but last week, as the seagulls screeched and a big white full moon rose behind Kennedy Airport, the pier was peaceful.

Andrew D'Onofrio, a 48-year-old Bensonhurst native who fished there as a boy, was back for some afternoon angling, all the way from his home in Staten Island. A nice place to fish is important, he said, because so much of fishing is sitting around. ''You know what it is?'' he said. ''More often than not, depending on what you're fishing for, you're not going to catch it.''

He thought he saw some fish jumping and moved a few yards down. ''Fishermen are crazy,'' he said. ''We spend a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of money, for something you can go in the store and purchase for a lot less.''